Authors: Glen Sean Coulthard
Tags: #SOC021000 Social Science / Ethnic Studies / Native American Studies
All of this is to say that the January 11 meeting did not transpire without major controversy. One of the most significant points of contention involved the refusal of Prime Minister Harper to include the participation of Governor-General David Johnson in the meeting, thwarting the demand of Chief Spence and a growing number of First Nations leaders and Idle No More supporters. As the Crown’s official representative in Canada, the governor-general’s roles and responsibilities are today largely symbolic in nature. However, from the perspective of treaty First Nations, securing a meeting with the governor-general would have emphasized the nation-to-nation character of the relationship between First Nations and the Crown. This is especially important given the manner in which Canada has failed to live up to the spirit and intent of these historic agreements. Prime Minister Harper’s refusal to concede to Chief Spence’s demand on this point signified a refusal by Canada to take the treaty relationship seriously more generally, which was the central point of demanding a meeting with the governor-general’s participation to begin with. Combined with the previously mentioned concern of cooptation, the failure to invite the governor-general resulted in a boycott of the meeting by a number of prominent leaders within the Assembly of First Nations, including the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, which represents sixty-four First Nations in the province of Manitoba.
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Chief Spence also declined to attend the meeting as well as break with her hunger strike.
Native anger and frustration in the immediate lead-up to the January 11 gathering resulted in a call among some Idle No More supporters for an escalation in land-based direct action, including by Grand Chief Derek Nepinak of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs: “The Idle No More movement has the people,” warned Nepinak at a January 10 press conference, “it has the people and the numbers that can bring the Canadian economy to its knees. . . . We have the warriors that are standing up now that are willing to go that far.”
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Apparently many activists shared Chief Nepinak’s sentiment, and on January 16 another national day of action was called, this time focusing on more assertive forms of Indigenous protest. Actions including rallies, railway blockades, and traffic stoppages swept across the country, including railway barricades erected in Manitoba, Ontario, and British Columbia; highway and bridge stoppages in British Columbia, Ontario, New Brunswick, and Alberta; as well as the now regular display of marches, flash-mob round-dances, drumming, and prayer circles.
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By the last week in January media speculation was beginning to circulate about the possibility of Chief Spence ending her hunger strike after securing a “Declaration of Commitment” by the executive committee of the Assembly of First Nations, the Native Women’s Association of Canada, and the caucuses of two of Canada’s federal opposition parties, the New Democrats and the Liberals. On January 23 it was confirmed that Chief Spence (along with Raymond Robinson of Cross Lake, Manitoba, who was also on a hunger strike) would be ending her strike the following day. The “Declaration of Commitment” that ended the two hunger strikes was the culmination of a week’s worth of negotiations led by Native leader Alvin Fiddler and interim Liberal Party leader Bob Rae. Among the thirteen points of the declaration is a call for a “national inquiry” into the hundreds of cases of murdered and missing Aboriginal women that have gone unsolved in Canada; improving Aboriginal education and housing; fully implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; reform of the federal government’s comprehensive lands claims policy; the establishment of an implementation framework for First Nations’ treaty rights; and, of course, a comprehensive review of Bill C-45, undertaken with meaningful consultation with Aboriginal peoples.
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As I was a close observer of the movement in general and a regular participant in the Idle No More events and teach-ins in the Vancouver area in particular, by late January it had become clear to me that a relative decline in Idle
No More’s more overt and thus publically conspicuous forms of protest was underway. Somewhat predictably, this was interpreted by many outlets of Canada’s corporate media as a decline in the movement itself. In newspeak, Idle No More had “lost its legs.” At that time, I sensed that a moment of pause and critical reflection was underway, yes, but this should not be interpreted as a deterioration of the movement’s spirit and resolve. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has stated that, despite the outcry of informed concerns emanating from Indigenous communities and their allies through spring 2013, Bill C-45 is not up for negotiation. Business, in other words, will proceed as usual. As long as the land remains in jeopardy, supporters of movements like Idle No More will continue the struggle. “We’re in this for the long haul,” explains Pamela Palmater. “It was never meant to be a flashy one month, then go away. This is something that’s years in the making. . . . You’ll see it take different forms at different times, but it’s not going away anytime soon.”
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Indeed, the recent escalation and increased public visibility of Indigenous anti-fracking protests in places like Elsipogtog, New Brunswick, along with the ongoing anti–oil sands activism led by Native communities in northern Alberta, and the unrelenting antipipeline campaigns mounted by First Nations communities across British Columbia, are a clear demonstration of Indigenous peoples’ continued resolve to defend their land and sovereignty from further encroachments by state and capital.
Five Theses on Indigenous Resurgence and Decolonization
As a conclusion to this study I want to critically reflect on the Idle No More movement in light of what we have discussed up to this point. With this as my aim, I will organize my thoughts around five theses on Indigenous resurgence. These theses are not meant to be overly prescriptive or conclusive. Instead I propose them with the aim of both consolidating and contributing to the constructive debates and critical conversations that have already animated the movement to date. They also indicate areas where future research is required.
Thesis 1: On the Necessity of Direct Action
I am going to structure my comments on direct action around a discursive restraint that has increasingly been placed on movements like Idle No More (both from within and from without) since the debates that emerged leading
into the January 11 meeting with Prime Minister Harper and the January 16 national day of action. This constraint involves the type of tactics that are being represented as morally legitimate in our efforts to defend our land and rights as Indigenous peoples, on the one hand, and those that are increasingly being presented as either morally illegitimate or at least politically self-defeating because of their disruptive, extralegal, and therefore potentially alienating character, on the other hand.
With respect to those approaches deemed “legitimate” in defending our rights, emphasis is usually placed on formal “negotiations”—usually carried out between “official” Aboriginal leadership and representatives of the state—and if need be coupled with largely symbolic acts of peaceful, nondisruptive protest that abide by Canada’s “rule of law.” Those approaches that are increasingly deemed “illegitimate” include, but are not limited to, forms of “direct action” that seek to influence power through less mediated and sometimes more disruptive and confrontational measures. In the context of Indigenous peoples’ struggles, the forms of “direct action” often taken to be problematic include activities like temporarily blocking access to Indigenous territories with the aim of impeding the exploitation of Indigenous peoples’ land and resources, or in rarer cases still, the more-or-less permanent reoccupation of a portion of Native land through the establishment of a reclamation site which also serves to disrupt, if not entirely block, access to Indigenous peoples’ territories by state and capital for sustained periods of time. Even though these actions may be oriented toward gaining some solid commitment by the state to curtail its colonial activities, I think that they still ought to be considered “direct action” for three reasons: first, the practices are directly undertaken by the subjects of colonial oppression themselves and seek to produce an immediate power effect; second, they are undertaken in a way that indicates a loosening of internalized colonialism, which is itself a precondition for any meaningful change; and third, they are prefigurative in the sense that they build the skills and social relationships (including those with the land) that are required within and among Indigenous communities to construct alternatives to the colonial relationship in the long run. Regardless of their diversity and specificity, however, most of these actions tend to get branded in the media as the typical Native “blockade.” Militant, threatening, disruptive, and violent.
The following positions are typical of those that emerged in the wake of the January 11 meeting regarding use of these direct action tactics to defend
Indigenous peoples’ land and interests. The first position is drawn from a statement made by the former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Ovide Mercredi, at an Aboriginal leadership gathering in the spring of 2013. In his speech Mercredi boldly stated that it is “only through talk, not through blockades that [real] progress will be made.”
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The assumption here, of course, is that the most productive means to forge lasting change in the lives of Indigenous people and communities is through the formal channels of negotiation. The second example is slightly more predictable. It is drawn from a statement made by Prime Minister Stephen Harper: “People have the right in our country to demonstrate and express their points of view peacefully as long as they obey the law, but I think the Canadian population expects everyone will obey the law in holding such protests.”
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There are three arguments that typically get used when critics rail against the use of more assertive forms of Indigenous protest actions. The first is the one clearly articulated by Mecredi in the statement I just quoted: negotiations are, objectively speaking, simply more effective in securing the rights and advancing the interests of Indigenous communities. This is simply false. Historically, I would venture to suggest that all negotiations over the scope and content of Aboriginal peoples’ rights in the last forty years have piggybacked off the assertive direct actions—including the escalated use of blockades—spearheaded by Indigenous women and other grassroots elements of our communities. For example, there would likely have been
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negotiations over Aboriginal rights and title in British Columbia through the current land claims process (as problematic as it is) if it were not for the ongoing commitment of Indigenous activists willing to put their bodies on the line in defense of their lands and communities. There would have likely been
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Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples without the land-based direct actions of the Innu in Labrador, the Lubicon Cree in Alberta, the Algonquin of Barrier Lake, the Mohawks of Kanesatake and Kahnawake, the Haida of Haida Gwaii, the Anishanaabe of Temagami, and the countless other Indigenous communities across Canada that have put themselves directly in harm’s way in the defense of their lands and distinct ways of life. Likewise, there would have likely been
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provincial inquiry (there has yet to be a national one) into the shameful number of murdered and missing Indigenous women in Vancouver and across the province if it were not for the thousands of Native women and their allies who have formed lasting networks of mutual care and support and taken to the streets
every year on February 14 for more than two decades to ensure that state-sanctioned sexual violence against Indigenous women ends here and now. All of this is to say that if there has been any progress in securing our rights to land and life—including through the largely male-dominated world of formal negotiations—this progress is owed to the courageous activists practicing their obligations to the land and to each other in these diverse networks and communities of struggle.
The second argument that gets used to denounce or criticize more “disruptive” forms of Indigenous direct action involve these actions’ supposedly “self-defeating” or “alienating” character.
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The idea this time is that insofar as these tactics disrupt the lives of perhaps well-intentioned but equally uninformed non-Indigenous people, First Nations will increasingly find themselves alienated and our causes unsupported by average, working-class Canadians. I have two brief points to make here.
First, I think that getting this reaction from the dominant society is unavoidable. Indigenous people have within their sights, now more than ever, a restructuring of the fundamental relationship between Indigenous nations and Canada. For more than two centuries the manifestations of this relationship have run roughshod over the rights of Indigenous peoples, which has resulted in a massive stockpiling of power and privilege by and for the dominant society. Land has been stolen, and significant amounts of it must be returned. Power and authority have been unjustly appropriated, and much of it will have to be reinstated. This will inevitably be very upsetting to some; it will be incredibly inconvenient to others. But it is what needs to happen if we are to create a more just and sustainable life in this country for the bulk of Indigenous communities, and for the majority of non-Indigenous people as well. To my mind, the apparent fact that many non-Indigenous people are “upset” or feel “alienated” by the aims of decolonization movements like Idle No More simply means that we are collectively doing something right.
My second point is that this criticism or concern smells of a double standard. I suspect that equally “disruptive” actions undertaken by various sectors of, for example, the mainstream labor movement, including job actions ranging from the withdrawal of teaching, transit, and healthcare services to full-blown strike activity, does not often undergo the same criticism and scrutiny by progressive non-Natives that Indigenous peoples’ movements are subjected to.
When these sectors of society courageously defend their rights outside of the increasingly hostile confines of imposed labor legislation—actions that also tend to disproportionately “disrupt” the lives of ordinary Canadians—it is crucial that we educate ourselves about the causes that inform these efforts. All Indigenous people ask is that the same courtesy and respect be offered our communities in our struggles.